The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [109]
The porch swing glided back and forth.
“We’ll need to think about it sometime.”
“She’s just a little girl. What are you suggesting?”
“Caroline. I’m not suggesting anything. You know I love Phoebe. But you or I, we could die tomorrow. We’re not always going to be around to take care of her, that’s all. And there may come a time when she doesn’t want us to. I’m just asking if you’ve thought about this. What you’re saving all that money for. I’m just raising the topic for discussion. I mean, think about it. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could come on the road with me now and again? Just for a weekend?”
“Yes,” she said softly. “That would be nice.”
But she wasn’t sure. Caroline tried to imagine Al’s life, a different room every night, a different city, and the road unfurling in the same gray ribbon. His first thought had been a restless one: sell the house, hit the road, roam the world.
Al nodded, drained his glass, and started to stand up.
“Don’t go just yet,” she said, putting her hand lightly on his arm. “I have to talk to you about something.”
“Sounds serious,” he said, settling back into the swing. He gave a nervous laugh. “You’re not leaving me, are you? Now that you’ve come into this inheritance and all?”
“Of course not; it’s nothing like that.” She sighed. “I got a letter this week,” she said. “It was a strange letter, and I need to talk about it.”
“A letter from who?”
“From Phoebe’s father.”
Al nodded and folded his arms, but he didn’t speak. He knew about the letters, of course. They’d been arriving for years, bearing cash in varying amounts and a note with a single scrawled sentence. Please let me know where you are living. She had not done this, but in the early years she’d told David Henry everything else. Heartfelt confessional letters, as if he were a friend close to her heart, a confidant. As time passed she’d become more efficient, sending photos and a line or two, at best. Her life had become so full and rich and complicated; there was no way to get it all down on paper, so she had simply stopped trying. What a shock it had been, then, to find a fat letter from David Henry, three full pages, written in his tight script, a passionate letter that started with Paul, his talent and his dreams, his rage and his anger.
I know it was a mistake. What I did, handing you my daughter, I know it was a terrible thing, and I know I can’t undo it. But I would like to meet her, Caroline, I would like to make amends, somehow. I’d like to know something more about Phoebe, and about your lives.
She was unnerved by the images he’d given her—Paul, a teenager, playing the guitar and dreaming of Juilliard, Norah with her own business, and David, fixed in her mind all these years, as clearly as a photograph in a book, bent over this piece of paper, filled with regret and yearning. She’d slipped the letter into a drawer, as if that might contain it, but the words had hovered in her mind through every moment of this task-filled and emotional week.
“He wants to meet her,” Caroline said, fingering the fringe of a shawl Doro had tossed over the arm of the swing. “To be a part of her life again somehow.”
“Nice of him,” Al said. “What a stand-up guy, after all this time.”
Caroline nodded. “He is her father, though.”
“Which makes me what, I wonder?”
“Please,” Caroline said. “You’re the father Phoebe knows and loves. But I didn’t tell you everything, Al, about how I came to have Phoebe. And I think I’d better.”
He took her hand in his.
“Caroline. I hung around in Lexington after you left. I talked to that neighbor of yours, and I heard lots of stories. Now, I didn’t get much schooling, but I’m not a stupid man, and I know that Dr. David Henry lost a baby girl about the time you left town. What I’m saying is that whatever happened between the two of you doesn’t matter. Not to me. Not to us. So I don’t need the details.”
She sat in silence, watching cars rush by on the highway.
“He didn’t want her,” she said. “He was going to put her in a home—an institution. He asked me to